Social Illusions: A lot of the world we see around us is an illusion.
Most of illusions are designed to trick the eyes, ears, and senses, but there are some examples of illusions that may alter our experience of reality.
If you take any piece of solid matter and put it under a microscope it loses its solidity. If you take a look at the color spectrum, what we see compared to what actually exists is miniscule.
If you take your view of the world and compare it to the beliefs of someone else, chances are even if you have a lot in common with that person you will both have some contradictory beliefs.
We have multiple religions, belief systems, schools of thought and scientific processes all claiming to be the true one, yet for every person who thinks their version is correct, there are a million others who challenge it.
Today I am going to be speaking about societal illusions. These are the societal illusions we generally accept as fact when in reality they are not needed for our survival.
5 Examples of Illusions In Everyday Life
1. Food
I’m not saying food is an illusion; we all need it for our survival. It is the feeling that we are reliant on other people for our food that is illusionary. It’s only in the last few decades that most of us have become totally dependent on others for our food. In reality, it is only a convenience.
People have the ability to cultivate their own food, create their own water supplies and provide all that is needed, we have just become culturally conditioned and in some cases legally restricted to believe that we are dependent on external sources.
2. Jobs
The reason most of us will not grow our own foods is because we are too busy at our jobs, which we go to in order to put food on our tables. I’m not saying all jobs are bad, I’m just saying that most people are working to provide things that are not needed because society deems them necessary.
If we had a cultural shift and made our individual and collective focus more on what we need and less on what we want, we could move away from the idea of being reliant on a job that does not serve us and move towards a lifestyle that does.
Read Best Jobs for You Based on Your Personality, Not Just Your Degree
3. War
All wars have 2 sides, yet we make our side seem heroic and noble, and the other side cowardly and pathetic.
The illusion here is that we are right and they are wrong, different countries have different cultures and while there are still a lot of human rights violations going on all over the globe, there are just as many happening in the western world.
Just because we say- this is what democracy looks like; it doesn’t mean that we have the right to enforce our style of democracy on the rest of the world.
War does not serve any constructive purpose and only creates victims on both sides.
4. Education
The current education system is a job-based system where you are trained to become a part of a bigger system.
We have rigid learning enforced upon us, in subjects that are pre-selected for us and while I would argue that Mathematics and English are important to progress, outside of those subjects there is a lot of unnecessary learning going on.
Education should be specialized to meet the learning needs of the children, and because it is so fixed certain groups are getting left behind. Basic skills like communication, compassion, and leadership are being ignored, while we are being bombarded with more information than we can ever take in or use.
5. Money
What is money? Money is the biggest illusion of them all and while currently, we need it to live the life we are accustomed to, it is ultimately unnecessary for our survival.
Money is something that is supposed to be used for trade, ultimately giving us a better quality of life. Yet collectively money is given priority over life.
We sacrifice our air supply for money. We sacrifice our ecosystems for money. Our food suffers because of money. Our health suffers for money and that is just touching the surface of the damage it causes.
Money is idolized as the true meaning of freedom when in reality it is money that imprisons us. If you don’t have it you want it and if you do have it you don’t want to lose it.
I hope that our future can be one without money, where necessities like clean water, clean food, clear air, clean energy, and a clean environment are provided to everyone and not commoditized for the benefit of a few people. But for now, we have to try to use the system that we have to make a change.
Read Can Saving Money Make You Happier?
What Is The Solution Real Life Illusions?
I know getting rid of these things may sound idealistic and maybe even a little fantasy, but it does make more sense than what we are currently doing. There are organizations out there who are trying to push these ideas forward and I would encourage you to watch the video below and check out what they are doing at – The Venus Project
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